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Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @11:50AM
from the giving-people-what-they-asked-for dept.

sfcrazy writes "The KDE team has announced the 4.10 releases of KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. It brings many improvements, features and polishes the UI even further, which already is one of the most polished, stable and mature desktop environments. With 4.10 KDE users can experience a much more sane global-menu like implementation without interrupting their workflow. A list of improvements is available here."
This release makes major steps toward further Qt Quick/QML integration (more plasmoids are written using QML, you can create animated desktops using QML, etc.). KWin's configuration applet also supports fetching extensions from KDE Look. Perhaps the best improvement is a new indexer for Nepomuk, with claims that the semantic desktop is finally usably fast (after suffering through a multi-week indexing on my laptop, I have to say Nepomuk is really cool, but having an unusable system for that long is not so I for one welcome our new indexing overlords).

This is actually a legit question. Mark Shuttleworth has repeatedly praised Qt. He has forked away from Gnome. The new Ubuntu phone interface is apparently written in Qt, and he is encouraging developers to write Qt/QML apps for his new phone platform.

I bet Ubuntu could recreate their Unity interface in Plasma/Qt easily enough. But the really interesting aspect of that is that they could create one device that could easily change UIs/shells based upon how it was used. A tablet could default a touch interface, but switch to a more traditional interface with paired with a keyboard. A phone interface could change to a desktop interface in a dock.

As I understand it the original Unity was on Qt. But now they are rewriting it to run on top of an extremely thin OpenGL wrapper instead. I know it sounds idiotic to reinvent a LGPL licensed wheel but this did seem to be their direction 6 months ago when I investigated helping out the UbuntuTV project (which is built on Unity of course).

Ubuntu should switch to KDE. But they laid off their last paid Kubuntu maintainer some time ago. They are focused, which is good; but they are focused on the wrong suite of

Thank goodness Canonical jettisoned Kubuntu. The project has been faster and leaner and more productive ever since. During the age of Canonical's "guidance" the monthly updates released by KDE were released weeks later in Kubuntu. Now, KDE updates are released in Kubuntu's updates and backports PPA almost the same day or within a couple days maximum.Now that Kubuntu is sponsored by Blue Systems [blue-systems.com] rather than Canonical, the project has improved noticeably. An example of my first point is that 4.10

This is not necessarily always a good thing. KDE 4.10 has serious crashing bugs in plasma-desktop that were known and reported in 2012 while 4.10 was in beta. Now, if I upgrade my Kubuntu system, and don't manually avoid upgrading to 4.10, I may very well end up with an unusable desktop and be forced into doing a very messy, manual downgrade back to 4.9.5.

I bet Ubuntu could recreate their Unity interface in Plasma/Qt easily enough.

They already did (at least the port to Qt part), it was their version of Unity for low-end devices and graphics cards that do not support 3D acceleration on GNU/Linux, and it was called Unity2D [launchpad.net].

Unfortunately they ditched it [omgubuntu.co.uk] and are going to use LLVMpipe to make the full Unity work with the low-end/non-3D-supporting devices instead. It's easier to support a single codebase, I suppose. However, this does show that you're correct: Uni

AFAICT it was a licensing issue for the longest time. Previously, the licensing options for Qt forced developers to either use GPL for their code, or to buy a commercial license from Trolltech if they wanted their code proprietary. It wasn't a bad deal for free software, but not a good proposition for luring developers to the platform. Of course, today the available licenses [digia.com] from Digia also include LGPL, but that came pretty late.

Previously, the licensing options for Qt forced developers to either use GPL for their code, or to buy a commercial license from Trolltech if they wanted their code proprietary. It wasn't a bad deal for free software, but not a good proposition for luring developers to the platform.

Charging developers seems to work rather well for Apple, despite their $99/year iOS Developer Program fee. Unless you have a cult following like the late Jobs developers follow the users so if you could polish up the OSS desktop enough that users would come the developers would follow. That is to say they follow the money and users that don't insist on running pure OSS or are tech wizards in their own right who'd rather fix it themselves than give Ubuntu business. I'd love to see the alternate timeline wher

If you could not recoup 2000 E from gained productivity per developer over a year, the toolkit would have been no good, and you have no business in commercial applications. So it made a lot of sense.

I suspect even without the licensing thing, there would always have been a problem with a core of people wanting C and not C++, and a strong NIH syndrome at RedHat... Had it been only a licensing thing, there was this project to recode Qt called harmony which was pretty far along.

As long as you were not going to redistribute you soft, you could use the free version. And then, what do you know, buy the commercial one, pretend your developers are magic and it's done. TT was not going to stop you...

It's just that "free" is somehow infinitely better than "really, really cheap". But even then TT worked pretty well.

The point is that Trolltech was very approachable, and would probably have agreed to have developers "try out" their kit. But this was never what the whole controversy was about. Also, it is completely unenforceable to prevent people from using the free version to develop their apps and buy the nonfree one at the last instant. It never was a real problem except for freeware and shareware developers (who are slightly scummy from the point of view of free software anyway).

AFAICT it was a licensing issue for the longest time. Previously, the licensing options for Qt forced developers to either use GPL for their code, or to buy a commercial license from Trolltech if they wanted their code proprietary. It wasn't a bad deal for free software, but not a good proposition for luring developers to the platform. Of course, today the available licenses [digia.com] from Digia also include LGPL, but that came pretty late.

This AC needs modded up for being spot-on. That has always been my experience with both Nepomuk and Akonadi. The only difference is that sometimes, in the newer KDE releases, it waits until the desktop has been up and running for a few minutes before crashing.

Indeed! On one of my user accounts, the only solution is to $(chmod -x/usr/bin/akonadi*), otherwise the whole computer locks up a few minutes after logging in because akonadi processes run amok, sucking up all CPU, causing excessive I/O, and apparently causing some kind of weird kernel or hardware bug. But I never have that problem except when caused by akonadi.

Just to clarify for people, the new Nepomuk indexer was COMPLETLY and UTTERLY rewritten from scratch and shares ZERO of the old code. IT uses 2 pass indexing just like OS X-- pass 1 is just file name and location so that basic search works. Pass 2 is when it starts figuring out music tags or director tags for movies , things like that.

One of the reasons the old indexer was so slow would be because you could search by content WITHIN the files, unfortunately it would scan every file, even those without any useful content for indexing like movies or music. This does mean some reduced functionality but it also means a lot more stable and quick system.

Also STRIGI has been completly thrown out so thats not an issue anymore.

This is more insightful than some may give credit for. All these years, the buggy mess of Nepomuk was released over and over, forced upon innocent users, when it never should have left private development builds. It was justified by "getting more exposure" to "fix more bugs faster", but all it really did was waste real people's time and energy.

KDE needs something like Debian's ftpmasters: a person or team with the authority to say "no" to a developer who wants his pet software released with the rest of KD

I was a big time fan of KDE2/3. The 4.0 release was far too rushed and eventually made me switch entirely to Fluxbox, which these days I've replaced with XCFE. I can't imagine switching back now but the change list and features in this 4.10 series make KDE a much more viable alternative to other WMs now.
I feel a bit sorry for the KDE developers - I got the impression there was a sea-change in the project with the 4.x branch that they've had to slog uphill to overcome.

There was a sea change. KDE has gone just as mad as GNOME when it comes to adding ridiculous features. The only difference is that, in traditional KDE style, Plasma can be completely configured. And also in traditional KDE style, the one thing you can't configure it to do is look nice.

" And also in traditional KDE style, the one thing you can't configure it to do is look nice."

Bullshit. I have one of the nicest looking WM setups I have ever seen, and people who are used to Windows always do a double-take and ask me what software I am using to get such an awesome look. I don't even have this latest release and my 4 year old laptop is already blazing fast with KDE. Anyone who complains about performance or a look they don't like is either trolling or ignorant and/or incompetent.

D) It is subjective, so trying to offer objective proof is almost as stupid as asking for it

So quit bragging about it if you know it only looks good to you, and will undoubtedly look like shit to everyone else. For all we know, you could just have gay porn or something on your desktop with rose-red transparent window decorations. Maybe you have an animated sex clip of some guy getting pounded up the tailpipe by another guy for your background, which could explain why it supposedly wouldn't work in still image form. Seriously, if you can't or won't back it up, STFU. If you can't even say what i

"So quit bragging about it if you know it only looks good to you, and will undoubtedly look like shit to everyone else."

Right. Because claiming I have the best setup for me is bragging, and one can reasonably conclude that if it is best for me, then everyone else in the world will hate it. Either that or you are a moron.

Hey, I'm not the person bragging on the Internet that I have the coolest desktop wallpaper around, that everyone who sees it is instantly in awe (doesn't this refute your claim that everyone else will hate it?). Yet when people ask to see it, "what, you think I'm gonna show you? Go watch YouTube or something." If you don't think you were bragging, then I would suggest you pick up a dictionary and enlighten yourself. The word has existed long before the Internet.

brag1.to use boastful language; boast: He bragged endlessly about his high score.verb (used with object)2.to boast of: He bragged that he had won.noun3.a boast or vaunt.4.a thing to boast of.

Would you care to tell me how your behavior and wording does not fit perfectly in the above definitions? I have a few other definitions that describe you well that I recommend you look up. They are: egotistical, condescending, and asshole. And with that, I'm leaving this topic--I've fed the troll enough.

You seem to be confusing high temperatures, noisy fans and the aroma of burning components with the perception of speed. I blame this perceptual dissonance on unquestioning and/or subconscious acquiescence to the slashdot cult of the car analogy, possibly compounded by too many hours watching nascar. Another win for nepomuk and the semantic desktop.

... or you could google disable nepomuk and click on the first link, and then you know... disable strigi. Of course, on my 4 year old laptop I have no need to do that, so my guess is that you haven't tried a recent version of KDE.

and people who are used to Windows always do a double-take and ask me what software I am using to get such an awesome look

. . . I find this to be an incredibly ironic statement. I am primarily a Windows user - and granted - I am exposed to pretty much every OS out there (and my heart goes to OpenStep; and I do use Unity for my home setup) - but, frankly, I always found Windows to be pretty much butt-ugly.

There's a lot of ugly Gnome themes out there. And OS X is getting pretty long in the tooth. But they

I disagree. I've been using KDE 4 for many years, and it has not gotten faster in every way. On a 2+GHz Core2Duo system with 3 GB of RAM, things like this happen all the time:

* Dolphin takes 30+ seconds to launch because of all the stuff it has to read off the disk just to run* Plasma freezes for seconds at a time* The "classic" launcher menu takes a long time to open* Hovering over an image in Dolphin to get a thumbnail takes 30+ seconds because I guess it has to read in so many libraries just to run the

There was a sea change. KDE has gone just as mad as GNOME when it comes to adding ridiculous features. The only difference is that, in traditional KDE style, Plasma can be completely configured. And also in traditional KDE style, the one thing you can't configure it to do is look nice.

Of course, the fact that you can make KDE look identical to any major OS with a GUI that has ever been built, makes your comment a bit absurd.

Perhaps you're talking about more than the theming capabilities?

The only thing I'd say is that there is a lack of really nice widget styles (note, not window themes), but that's a question of current availability, not that you can't do it.

How tight is the integration between text based configuration tools in/etc/ and the KDE widgets themselves? Does KDE know how to connect those to the corresponding files in all the OSs it supports, depending on whether the underlying base OS is Debian, Fedora, FBSD/PC-BSD, Gentoo, Slackware and so on? I would think that that one thing is the key to eliminating the dependence on the CLI to configure various things in the OS, whether it is the networking & wi-fi, IP Tables or pF, and so on. Can one a

No offence... but isn't it time we stop complaining about 4.0 every time there is a KDE story?

I totally agree. I switched to KDE just last year, so for me the experience was awesome from the beginning. Continually hearing about old bugs from 2008 that were fixed long ago is like listening to people who are still bitter about Windows ME. Give it a rest already.

4.0 was meant to be a rough implementation not aimed at or recommended for end users, but with a stable API so that KDE developers could start developing and porting apps for KDE 4 and not have to worry about rewriting them again later, so that there would be a large ecosystem of software ready for when KDE4 would be at a point where it was good enough to recommend over KDE 3.5, which was expected to be at roughly 4.3 or 4.4.

I just upgraded and luckily my heavily customized setup from 4.9 is intact. KDE's been snappy on this notebook anyway and completely problem-free for months (well only Firefox in conjunction with Google Docs freezes like once a day... but that's an FF bug) frankly I wouldn't use it if it was slow, so I don't see any particular change in speed.. and I was running the indexers and whatnot before. The only thing that was using a lot of resources (imo) was Amarok, but then I removed all services, plugins and stuff I don't use, and now it never goes over 70 MB after playing music all day.I've been using KDE for less than a year but all in all I like this desktop.

Between those "features" and knotify4 hogging 97% of the CPU after a certain period of uptime (along with the inevitable system lockups), I switched to openbox and have had nothing but stability ever since. I liked KDE but it was just more hassle, than it was worth. I very much wish they'd make a slimmed down, window manager only version.

What difference does it make? Does a desktop get a pass for instability, simply because it's aiming for a higher goal? And I'm not even comparing. I'm just saying I had to move on to something useable.

Does a desktop get a pass for instability, simply because it's aiming for a higher goal?

Nothing should get a pass for instability. But Openbox is a much simpler system and it's obvious that there is less things to go wrong. It's like finding some problems in Microsoft Office and then you rejoice how you find much more stability in Notepad. Not a fair comparison.

Of course, that being said, if Openbox provides you everything you need and it works well, then it's of course an excellent choice. Maybe you only needed a screwdriver and not the whole toolbox.

hey guys- I've replaced my full blownout desktop environment with a lot of different services and stuff tightly integrated into it to make this shit actually useful for this window manager and oh boy, it's so much faster!

I run KDE on my work laptop. Have had the machine turned on without a reboot for over 6 months now and haven't experienced any rogue processes or major memory leaks. I'm about to do some kernel updates though, so here comes a reboot! =)

Yeah, there's no rational reason you shouldn't be able to configure that out of existence, especially given that KDE is configurability-oriented.

For what it's worth, the "py-cashew" widget will make it disappear. Just click "Get New Widgets" when adding widgets, and search for "cashew". Not an optimal solution, but it seems to work fine from here.

I've been a KDE user from 1.x but KIO and Nepomuk have been enough to really make me consider moving to something else. I use Midnight Commander for all my big/important file moves, not because I LIKE to use it better but because I've had way too many occasions where anything that uses KIO just royally hoses up my files. I've actually lost data to how poorly that performs. It hasn't been limited to just one system either, it's been multiple computers over the years. I really want to use Konqueror, Dolphin and Krusader but for the integrity of my files I avoid it.

Akonadi seems to be rather a pain also.

Get rid of Nepomuk, Akonadi, and KIOslave hosing up your files KDE is rather nice. But is it really KDE anymore?

Just to be clear, I've been on KDE from 1.x until now, I'm not a hater, I've stuck with KDE through when I first toyed with Redhat, to SuSE, to Debian, and now Kubuntu, I'm certainly not a hater, but where there's flaws the flaws are grand.

I could use the command line, but I find using Midnight Commander - even in X - is easier. Less typing. If I didn't care about the integrity of my files I could use any of the KDE file managers, but I've wasted enough time on that. Fortunately most of my file corruption has come from file copy operations, not moves between devices.

Midnight commander has one option most file managers seem to lack which I find incredibly useful. I can chose "only if size differs" when overwriting files. It saves a lot of

I didn't take it as such. I mostly replied to bring attention to the file corruption issue and the awesome "only if size differs" option. I've looked through the bug-boards on the file corruption issue, I'm not the only person who's had it but the universal response to the many, many reports of the bug has been "unable to duplicate problem - closed".

I've had success in the past calling out software folks on Slashdot, especially when they hose over their own "proper way" of submitting bugs. When the corre

Yes. It's quite unbelievably faster, in fact. You know those features in KDE1 and 2 that didn't exist until the 4.x series? Instead of waiting around fifteen years for them to work (and be developed), now they work in a few seconds on average. That's a considerable speed increase.

It does for folk who like it that way, and those unable to navigate clicky GUI configuration options with big icons and explanatory tooltips, and change it.My KDE UI looks nothing like the default. But it's not about the UI, anyway:)

I've found Windows' power management to be much more reliable since Vista, though of course only OSX gets it mostly right, and that's largely because Apple controls the hardware. The only time I've ever had hibernation working close to 100% reliably in Linux (so, no crashes after resume, no blank screens, and the only broken drivers were network-related and fixable with a couple rmmod/modprobes) was on an old IBM Thinkpad, and that's only because it had a feature that let you create a special HD partition

100% CPU usage is not a bug but a symptom of a bug. There are numerous bugs and warts in numerous programs that cause 100% CPU usage. (And of course, it's not a bug if the program is doing useful computation...)

Is your issue Fedora or KDE related? If Fedora subscribe here [fedoraforum.org] or if KDE related subscribe here [kde.org]. Personally I have not had many problems with Fedora (I have 18) and even less with KDE although I did switch to Gnome for a few months when KDE 4.0 came out.

That's apparently controlled by the "Widget style". If you use the "Bespin" style, for instance, then one of the things you can configure in "Input/System" is called "Dialog buttons layout". They offer four choices: Windows, OS X, KDE, and Gnome.

Semantic desktop. It is ahead of it's time, for sure. I personally love the akonadi/nepomuk/indexer stuff. It's taken a while to get there, but its awesome. Anecdotally, Microsoft have been trying to do the very same thing with their WinFS filesystem since Vista was a twinkle in their eye - but have so far failed to do much with it. KDE on the other hand has really gotten somewhere - thanks to the EU.;)